Solutions
by lunchinanelevator
Summary: Takes place in and around 3.11, "What Went Wrong." Kalindaful. Please R&R!
1. Chapter 1

**1.**

Kalinda's not sure how many hours she's been here—her phone is sealed in a plastic bag behind the arresting officer's desk, along with her necklace, her wallet, and the switchblade from the sole of her boot that inspired a much more thorough and disturbing pat-down—and the fierce anger that had been twisting through her since Cary ordered her cuffed has lapsed away, given way to something quieter and more insidious. She keeps her spine straight, glancing sidelong at the slumping blonde form of the clearly intoxicated woman on the bench perpendicular to hers. Three women have come and gone from the holding cell in the time Kalinda's been sitting here. Vagrants, misdemeanors. Something clicks in the back of Kalinda's throat, and she swallows convulsively against it, her hands in her pockets, resolutely still. This is the only way she can think of not to pace until she has ground the heels of her boots to powder. The cement blocks of the walls, the bars, the helplessness, it's almost enough to make her scared, enough to make her hurt, enough to make her visible. It's almost enough to undo Kalinda.

Every cop Kalinda has cajoled over the years, every lawyer she's gazed at through lowered lashes, every protective measure she has taken, she's done so that she wouldn't end up caged, completely at the mercy of someone else who's decided to hate her. No one is coming to help Kalinda (she thinks, with a wrench of self-pity she would not for a second countenance in anyone else); while that's been true for a long time, she's taken pains to ensure that it wouldn't matter. It mattered to Leela, and Kalinda wouldn't wish Leela on anyone, least of all herself. Leela's neediness her old life, and it ruined Alicia, and here it is, once again, chokeholding Kalinda and obscuring her vision.

She hears the danger of losing control, and starts running down her options in her head. She'd told Cary this wouldn't stand up, and she knows it to be true; she's not looking at a felony conviction, and this is nowhere near as bad as it could be. But she needs to find someone who can send gossip Diane's way—she left a message on Will's phone, which alone demonstrates that she wasn't thinking clearly. In a situation like this, you call the more reliable partner, the one not distracted by his own impending indictment. She wanted Diane to think better of her, she realizes with some frustration. Will already understands what she's like, what Cary's like. To him none of this would make a difference.

Well, now she knows. But unless Lockhart/Gardner get the word soon she'll be taken down to 26th and California without representation. Into her head flies the image of Donna Seabrook as her public defender; she's about to laugh when Dana walks in, wearing a replica of Kalinda's blue leather jacket.

Kalinda rises with deliberation, imagining a conflict brewing between Cary and his lady love over her arrest, imagining that all the drinks she's had with ASA Lodge have served a purpose. Her shrug when Dana asks how she's doing is infused with a gentleness that she has noticed tends to make Dana's eyes linger a bit longer at the bar, her Freudian slips increase.

"'Cause you're looking a little pale."

Kalinda stays silent, turns her back to the cell door. She's been outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and she doesn't want to see any more of Dana's triumphant smirk than she's already been subjected to.

And then she's in a maze of cement hallways, her wrists once again cuffed, some young giant of an officer keeping one hand firmly on her shoulder, one a little too low on her back. She's hovered at the door while Alicia talks to her pro bono clients enough to know what this means: another day, maybe two or three, "out of circulation," in Cary's words. She should have read this plan twitching at the corners of Dana's lips, bouncing off her eyelids—it seems that lately she wants things so much she's started to look for them. It is the worst professional and personal quality she could possibly have, and it has to stop. Kalinda rolls her eyes, dismissing the forming tears to the back of her skull. Two or three days, their clients have handled worse, even Leela handled worse. Kalinda should be able to take it.

The officer steering her hands her off to his colleague, a woman this time. She flicks dull eyes over Kalinda, leads her into a small holding cell with a steel door, a cement bench, and a high and narrow plexiglass window reinforced with chicken wire, informs her in a monotone that the van will be here within the hour, and leaves the cuffs on as she locks the door behind her.

Kalinda's shoulders are cramping. There's not much she can do about that. Once again she loses track of time, wondering if they actually intend to take her to a hospital, wondering where the shuffled lawyerless clients do end up, incredulous that she has never bothered to find out. Donna is starting to seem like a better and better option, which is how Kalinda knows that she's stopped thinking rationally, that she's in trouble. Knowing which bridges she can still cross, and which she's burned, is one of the qualities that makes her good at her job. One that would make her better, she thinks, would be burning fewer bridges. Through her brain ticks a list of people she has lost, Cary's name now added to it. She only partially registers it when the cell door thuds open.

"You've got company," the officer says.

Kalinda steels herself, and the officer puts a hand under her arm to haul her up. She steers Kalinda through the open door, out past the desk, and when Kalinda sees who is in the hallway she stops dead, thinking that a Cook County prison van to the hospital might well have been a better idea.


	2. Chapter 2

**2.**

They don't say another word as Alicia pulls out of the lot, as she turns onto State. It occurs to Kalinda that a normal person might try to dispel the remaining awkwardness, that she's managed to make small talk with a score of former lovers and there's no reason speaking to Alicia should be any worse. She has not been alone with Alicia in even a conference room for nearly a year now, never mind in a car close enough to touch. She jams her hands into her pockets, her heart beating fiercely enough to rip through the leather.

Alicia's phone buzzes. "Hello?" she says. "Yes. She's here. Everything's fine, Diane. Yes. I'll take care of it. Yes, I look forward to it as well. I'll see you soon." She slips the phone back into her coat pocket, then turns onto Roosevelt.

The drive won't take long, but Kalinda recalls from the many times she drove back from the courthouse with Alicia that this is not the route she takes to the office. Alicia intends to give her a ride home. She wants to protest, say that she needs to get back to work on the jurors—Kalinda's empathy for Lauren Fisher, guilty or not, seems to have increased exponentially in the last several hours—but she's ready for a shower, ready to peel from her shoulders a jacket whose lining is now tacky with sweat. She whisks her eyes sideways to glance over Alicia in wonder, the sensitivity she's shown. For Alicia's sake she wants to tell her not to be so kind, that it's unearned—of course Grace would have come home on her own; aside from Peter Florrick Kalinda cannot imagine who would be fool enough not to come home to Alicia when given the chance—and that Kalinda is no good to the people she's close to, she can only seduce them or make them hate her, and Alicia was wise to get out when she could. For Kalinda's own sake she wants to take Alicia's face between her hands, her lips between her teeth, her thigh between her legs. She wants to see Alicia's face flushed and her eyes rolled back, she wants her unbuttoned. But she would settle for kindness, for peace.

Alicia has been to Kalinda's apartment only once, the night after Kalinda's first grand jury appearance last year. Declaring that Kalinda needed a stiff drink and sleep, she ostentatiously proffered the change-of-address card that Kalinda had given her two weeks before and plugged it into her GPS. Kalinda smiled—Chicago's a grid and she herself could find any address in the city with one hand behind her back, but Alicia was still the suburban housewife, unaccustomed to navigating the city. She found a miraculous parking space a block away and trotted towards the building beside Kalinda, who was still puzzled and shell-shocked by the last few days.

There's a cluster of traffic at Racine, sirens flashing, two lanes of cars at a standstill in front of them, drivers rubbernecking fiercely. "Fuck," Alicia sighs. If they were friends, Kalinda would allow herself a smile at the profanity, but as it is, she still can't breathe right and she doesn't think her face can do that.

Inside Kalinda's apartment Alicia had instructed her to sit, opening cupboards in search of tea and bourbon. Kalinda would not have allowed anyone but Alicia to open a single door, but really, she figured, the kitchen was safe enough. Alicia rolled her eyes at the barrenness of Kalinda's cabinets but fixed her a cup of tea with a shot in it. After both of them had downed a few glasses, bracing themselves for sharing the news with Will and Diane tomorrow morning, they had started to mock Glenn Childs' facial expressions in court, some of Alicia's vocal imitations uncanny. She was wearing a periwinkle jacket and the line of her jaw as she laughed, the line of her shell over her breasts—Kalinda couldn't imagine anything more graceful, more beautiful. Suddenly, awkwardly, Kalinda found her hand against Alicia's cheek, reminding herself of Cary a few nights before. Embarrassed by her lack of finesse, she leaned into Alicia's lips, ran a finger over her stocking.

They pass the knot of traffic and continue up Racine. Kalinda's phone gives a single beep, and she jumps; she'd forgotten it was there. It's Will. Kalinda refuses to add to the tension in the car, so she ignores the call. She'll see Will later—it's likely, in fact, that she'll see him for a drink tonight. She sighs. Or maybe tomorrow. Maybe tonight she'll just stay home. Alicia looks over when she hears her sigh, but says nothing, and Kalinda is grateful for the space and wants Alicia pressed against her.

Alicia put her hands on Kalinda's shoulders and pushed her back, her touch light and her fingers electric. "You're drunk," she said.

"Not as drunk as you," Kalinda protested, not sure what she was arguing.

"Don't," said Alicia softly. "Okay?"

Kalinda swept her eyes towards the kitchen cabinets. "Yeah," she said.

"It's not—Okay, Kalinda? Please."

She breathed in through her nose and forced herself to look at her friend, at her enviable stillness, her tailored grace. Alicia looked as calm as she always did, but her face rippled with worry—worry for her, Kalinda thought. Worry about hurting her, even then. "Yeah," she said again. Back then she could make herself smile when she needed to, but back then it was easy to smile around Alicia.

Alicia pulls up to the corner beside Kalinda's building, shifts the car into park, and looks at Kalinda with those same fierce, expectant eyebrows.

"Thanks," Kalinda chokes out again. "For everything. And the ride."

"You're welcome," Alicia says coolly. Kalinda remembers when she was unflappable, when she could maintain the distance and calm now painted on Alicia's face. Now all it takes is Alicia and she's ready to shatter. Kalinda tries to force a smile, but her face still doesn't seem to go that way. She slips out of the car and through her front door, wanting to be nowhere.


	3. Chapter 3

**3.**

Kalinda meets Will at their bar that night. The voice mail he left was brushed with casual regret—he was out of the office when it all went down, sorry he missed her and he hopes she's okay—and she's been carefully packaging the whole experience to allow Will to find it amusing, but when she sees him in a back corner fingering a draft beer she knows that her day behind bars won't even come up. Will stares into the rows of bottles with an air of confusion, wearing the unmistakable expression of someone who has lost Alicia Florrick.

Kalinda slides onto the stool beside him and orders two glasses of Scotch without saying a word. The bartender knows her—there have been a couple of delicious, urgent knee-tremblers beside the bathroom door after last call, a couple of observations about Lockhart/Gardner's opposing counsel's drunken revelations moaned against Kalinda's earlobe. Robyn is her name, Kalinda remembers grinding the word out as she came on the woman's fingers, but she's having trouble calling the surname to mind.

She waits for Will to start talking, deliver his usual nonsequitur opening line, but he stays silent, and Kalinda doesn't mind. She doesn't have anything to say herself.

Tomorrow she'll be in the office again, with Alicia, and everything will be different and everything will be exactly the same. Worse, now that calling upon Cary or Dana as a resource is out of the question. Now that Kalinda needs to subject her instincts to serious scrutiny. Now that she's lost the last of her ability to resist Alicia's sway and now that Alicia knows the lengths to which Kalinda would go for her. Kalinda drinks; beside her, Will mirrors her actions. After a day of shaking, the firm, slow burn of the alcohol is a relief.

Once Kalinda had survival skills; she excelled at keeping her head above water. That was how Will met her, how Peter Florrick knew her. But not Alicia. Now Kalinda staggers about as if detached from an iron lung, gasping and struggling for air.

Three silent Scotches in, Kalinda rubs her calf against Will's, the leather of her boot as alert as her skin.

Kalinda knows Alicia didn't understand what she meant when she told her, "I'm the same person." Will glances at her once, sideways, quickly, his nose a question mark. He gestures to Robyn for a fourth round, polishes off the warm beer that he's had from the beginning, and lets his hand drop to Kalinda's thigh as he puts the glass down.

Kalinda would kill someone to spare Alicia pain, of course, but if she were Leela again, with the same needs and the same opportunity, she would sleep with Peter Florrick in a second, even if she could have imagined Alicia, even knowing she and Alicia would both be hurt like they had never been hurt in their lives.

They dispose of their last drinks in short order, Kalinda choking, just slightly, as her breath quickens. Will's right hand stays beneath Kalinda's skirt; with the other hand he digs a few twenties from his coat pocket, laying them out for Robyn on the bar.

It's the basic difference between them, Kalinda thinks as she shrugs on her coat while Will hurries furtively into his. For Alicia, sex causes problems. Kalinda can imagine how Alicia ended things with Will, that expression of stiff, pained regret slashed across her face, whispering that it was too hard, too complicated, probably something to do with her children. Kalinda doesn't blame Alicia for that, not at all, though if she could speak coherently in the woman's presence she would point out the error in her logic—it's not the sex that causes the problems, it's the feelings. But maybe Alicia doesn't separate those out.

Kalinda's boots click on the marble floor as she strides out into the cold air, knowing that Will will follow her, and that if he didn't it wouldn't really matter.

It's different for her, she's not like Alicia. Sex offers solutions—sometimes to the problem of simple horniness, sometimes to something thornier. Kalinda's problems and Will's are definitely of the latter variety, but both of them seem to know the right answer. Alicia wouldn't understand.

In the alley behind the bar, Will presses Kalinda to the brick wall and kisses her with a desperation that has nothing to do with her. She arches up against him, not thinking about anything except his lips against her neck and his erection pushing on her hipbone, how sweet it all feels and how much she needs it.


End file.
